... captures this identity-altering brand of infatuation brilliantly ... Gunesekera’s prose is lush yet luminously clear, and Kairo — as he deciphers the world around him and his place in that world — is the perfect guide to the book’s turbulent setting. Kairo’s sense of cultural stirrings beyond Colombo is vivid, too ... Even the post-colonial politics of the book are couched in fanciful terms ... fresh ... wonderful.

... [a] strong, uneasy and sometimes dangerous friendship...acutely captured ... In interviews, Gunesekera has mentioned a personal loss, the death of a close friend of his youth many years ago. A novel need not be autobiographical to draw on life, but much of Suncatcher’s power comes from this place of intense feeling and remembered grief ...The story plunges into the darker parts of friendship — the enthralment, the pull exerted by the charmer over the charmed, the places into which one will dive, the other drawn along against his better instincts — with such skill that it’s an annoyance to have parts of it laden with heavy-footed symbolism ... The foreshadowing is often too blunt ... Yet...Gunesekera achieves something remarkable. As a coming-of-age novel, Suncatcher is memorable and sometimes brilliant in its ability to map the tensions between leader and follower, the arc and trajectory of boys trying so impatiently to become men. This is also a wise and poignant portrait of a country — Ceylon before it became Sri Lanka — caught in the moment before it loses its innocence, all the signs and portents in place, but the bloodiness of war still unthinkable.

The intensity and precariousness of Kairo’s feeling for Jay is beautifully realised, all the more so because his devotion to this life-enhancer is not entirely uncritical ... Still, it’s an enchanting novel in which the author skilfully marries his public theme of political uncertainty and imminent, perhaps alarming, change with the passions of adolescence, and also its langour. Though the setting is completely different, the mood of certain passages in the novel and the sense of the brevity of youth call to mind the early chapters of Brideshead Revisited. That’s to say, the author has created, or more exactly re-created, a world in which you are happy to linger, all the more so because you cannot escape an awareness of its fragility.

Various other characters, clearly etched, play minor roles, but this is essentially a deliciously paced coming-of-age tale about [Kairo and Jay] ... As Suncatcher traces a kind of awakening in its central characters, it also suggests another, harsher one in 1960s Sri Lanka. ... Gunesekera never labours such matters, letting the reader tease them out ... The novel is pervaded by a sense of threatened beauty: the flash of fish, the flight of birds, the slant of sun on trees, a yearning for innocence. The world described, like Jay, is brilliant, and far more brittle than it seems. The adults seem to blame the gathering clouds on different things, mostly religious and linguistic nationalism. Gunesekera does not give us any other explanation but he suggests ...an explanation more complicit, a failure ingrained deep in the colonial past.

There is an unevenness to the novel’s texture and tone, deriving in part from a failure to employ retrospection effectively to either heighten tension or illuminate the characters’ actions and motivations ... Gunesekera artfully renders the unequal relationship between the two boys, and the fractures within their families, but the external world never quite coheres with their interiors ... The dialogue is often similarly unconvincing. Tedious metaphors, drawing comparisons between birds and humans, cages and countries, overwhelm sentences. Characters such as Niromi, a girl Kairo worries may come between him and Jay, and Channa, a Tamil boy Jay rescues from bullies, aren’t fully fleshed out. Others appear to have an unfortunate predilection for making ominous remarks that portend the novel’s conclusion ... The writing is most successful when Gunesekera reins in the polemics and refracts through the young Kairo’s eyes the subtle ways in which divisions of class can manifest themselves.

Suncatcher is a novel of indolence, built on the way that lush gardens and tender feelings are described ... It’s no crime that Gunesekera puts sensibility over plot; so did Proust. Still, there’s always machinery, and the sprockets are rusty here. Kairo keeps overhearing the secrets that shape his life; he’s forever at his ‘listening post’ on the landing, or wandering into earshot of hapless adult chat. And few people in Gunesekera’s novels talk like creatures of flesh and blood ... But Suncatcher can be sumptuous too, painting the ‘slowly blistering air’ in the paddy fields and the wild colours of jungle life. And why not luxuriate? Childhood, like empire, was never a naturalistic thing.

In the foreground of the novel, events among its young protagonists accelerate towards disaster. But it’s what’s happening in the background — the slippage of democratic decency, the tightening of state control, the inflaming of ethnic tensions — that most grips you. Harking back to the 1960s in a period piece suffused with foreboding, Gunesekera captures the first rumblings of the cataclysm that would ruinously engulf his nation and that has always compulsively engaged him.

Gunesekera is an internationally acclaimed writer with a significant body of work, but his new novel is a programmatic piece of genre fiction, the coming-of-age storyline that launched a thousand films. An interesting sociopolitical setting is offered up but sketched so lightly that it doesn’t feel as though the book would need to change more than a few nouns in order to move to Australia, America or anywhere, really ... The writing is sometimes clumsy ... Glimpses of a lyrical and soulful voice flicker occasionally ... Ultimately, though, Suncatcher gives off the strangest air of not actually being a novel. It’s the plot of a teen movie reheated, all detail planed away to make room for the conventions of genre. It makes one ask what stories are actually for – aren’t novels called novels because they should contain something new?

Returning to the land of his roots as the setting for his novel, Gunesekera takes us on an enchanting exploration of an unlikely and, in some ways, unequal friendship, against the backdrop of a society in the first throes of turmoil. Particularly as seen with the power of hindsight given what we know of Sri Lanka’s troubled history, it’s a poignant tale of the loss of innocence, both at a personal and a political level ... For the most part, the Jay-Kairo friendship makes for a joyous narrative of relationships across the fence, so to speak, but even when it tugs at the heartstrings, Gunesekera’s elegaic prose has a curiously healing quality. As Jay says at a defining moment, you bury the dead and you learn to live — with loss and the inexplicable forces that shape a life.

Gunesekera’s latest is an entrancing examination of how we are marked by our earliest friendships and how, even in the closest relationships, it is difficult to know if those we love are capable of loving us back. Suncatcher’s long sections are often punctuated by sugary summaries of the characters’ emotional situations, but the fictional dream is rarely broken, with scenic details grounding readers just enough to anchor them to the honestly and realistically portrayed intimacies of boyhood friendship.

The story winds its unhurried way to a dramatic conclusion, although a subplot involving a girl who comes between the two friends never quite comes into focus ... A lyrical and evocative portrait of a Sri Lankan boyhood friendship and the life lessons that came with it.

Gunesekera’s engrossing coming-of-age tale...explores the porous class boundaries in 1960s Ceylon ... Gunesekera successfully captures an adolescent’s cravings for a wealthy lifestyle and the ensuing loss of innocence in the face of tumult. This will move readers.